Getting started on the Defect Family of reports, today we will modify the Defect Crystal Report that comes with a standard Implementation of Sage SalesLogix . On December 08, 2008 in a blog post labeled SalesLogix Contract and Defect Level Reports, I wrote the following section on the Defect Report.
Start Excerpt………..
There are no Condition filters installed for this report so some of the standard filtering is turned off. Also, When running this report, you are prompted with 5 Yes/No questions. It is my opinion these parameters should be set up to default to yes and allow the user to simply change the parameters to no instead of having to set each one by one. Finally, there are a couple of minor issues with layout that could be worked on. 
End Excerpt……………………………………………………
As always I did my database table review and I saw nothing out of order for this report.
I started by trying to recreate the error that I originally experienced in the original review. The error is not running in the 7.5.1 version of the report. So no action to take here, hopefully down the road I will get into a 7.2.2 version of SLX and see if I can recreate the issue.
Next up on the list was setting the parameters to default to Yes or No which is easy enough. Simply right click on the formula field you want to adjust and select edit out of the list that appears. Look for the Default value property and set it to True. Now, as a user, you only have to adjust for the what you do not want to see instead of having to set each parameter every time you run the report.
Next, I noticed a lot of Notes label displaying even though there weren’t Notes in the database to see. In each instance I added a formula to the Suppression Formula of the sections where these fields were displaying. The formulas looked something like this.
If IsNull({RMA.RMAID}) or {RMA.RMAID} = “”
or
IsNull({RMA.NOTES}) or {RMA.NOTES}= “”
Then
True
Else
False
The other Option was to create a formula field that simply displayed a message if there weren’t Notes in the field. The formula I used is below, once the field was created I replaced the target Notes field with the new formula field. Make sure to fremember to format the new field to Grow.
If IsNull({DEFECT.NOTES}) or {DEFECT.NOTES}=”” then “There are not any Defect Notes entered in the system”
else {DEFECT.NOTES}
Finally I formated the two date fields in section Group Header 1b of the report to display the date instead of Date and Time. As always I played around with alignment and font colors to try to put a neat finish to the report.
I think it is an improvement. Here is what the report looks like now:
As always, the free download of this report is available using this link.
Get all of our Free SalesLogix Reports here…
Have a great day!
